Technology is a wonderful thing, and the advent of social media has given us plenty of new ways to connect, but it all really comes down to how you use them. You can use social media to sit in your room and further isolate yourself, or you can use it to actually connect with other individuals in real life. How do you use technology to bring yourself into meat space and be with real people?

Just this last Friday, Whitson and I tried a new kind of Lifehacker meetup: we put together a dinner with Lifehacker fans on Grubwithus. Basically, we all gathered at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles and ate with a bunch of strangers. It was really fun, and pointed to a way the internet/technology can be used to connect with people in the real world in a meaningful way. It made me wonder why there isn't more of an online-to-offline movement, and why people are content with sitting in their rooms and updating their Facebook status while not really connecting with people in a meaningful way. You can barely communicate via text (body language and vocal cues make up the majority of communication, after all) so why does everyone seem to prefer interacting with their phones and Facebook rather than getting together in reality? You can blame social anxiety or laziness, but eventually most people are going to want to get offline and really connect. We've discovered one fun way to do it. What about you? How do you use the internet and technology to disconnect and interact in the real world?